Author: Spencer Bogart, General Partner at Blockchain Capital
Compiled by: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher
Most people look at on-chain technology and see faster, more efficient versions of existing technology: faster payments, lower settlement costs, more efficient capital markets. They are not wrong. This alone holds enormous opportunity and will produce many venture-scale outcomes over the next decade.
But I believe this is the smaller part of the story.
When I look at this technology, at the range of possibilities enabled by programmable assets in a global, composable, always-on environment, I think we've only scratched the surface. The most amazing things haven't been built yet. And the reason they haven't been built isn't because the technology isn't ready, but because we haven't conceived of them yet.
The Email Trap
In the early days of the internet, the most obvious use case was communication. Email was faster and cheaper than mail. Email was significant, but it wasn't created to speed up the postal service. It was its own thing, and it spread quickly. So, if you were evaluating the internet in 1995 and saw email widely adopted, you could reasonably conclude that the thesis was already proven.
But most of the opportunity wasn't even a bud yet. Search, social networking, e-commerce, cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), streaming—these weren't "faster versions of existing things"; they were new categories that were impossible before the internet created the conditions. Google wasn't a faster library, Facebook wasn't a faster phone book, AWS wasn't a faster server room. They only made sense once you had a globally connected, programmable network.
Collectively, these additional categories were orders of magnitude larger than the "faster communication" use case.
I think crypto is in a booming phase right now. Most attention is focused on making existing financial products run better on-chain, like faster settlement, cheaper cross-border payments, tokenized treasuries and stocks, and more efficient lending markets. And it's working: stablecoins will settle $33 trillion by 2025, and the market cap of tokenized treasuries recently surpassed $15 billion. The world's largest asset managers and banks are building on public chains.
That's great. I'm excited about all of it. I'm working on it every day. But this is the most obvious application; it fits perfectly with our existing mental models, and it's so large it's easy to mistake for the entire opportunity.
I'm more interested in the question: What becomes possible *only* when you have programmable resources in a global, composable, always-on, permissionless environment? What are the new verbs, the unnamed categories?
What a New Verb Looks Like
We have at least one clear example, worth studying because it illustrates what I think we'll often see.
What if you could borrow a billion dollars with no collateral, and the lender had mathematically guaranteed repayment?
That's a flash loan: borrow any amount with no collateral, provided you repay it within the same transaction. If you don't repay, the entire transaction reverts as if it never happened. The lender has zero risk. No credit check. No relationship needed. No collateral. Just the system's own logic providing the guarantee.
Before flash loans existed, no one needed them. Why? The concept was incompatible with the traditional financial system. It was useless before programmable assets existed, so there was no existing category to improve. Unc collateralized, unlimited, guaranteed-repayment lending is impossible in any system where trades take time. It only becomes possible when execution is atomic, assets are programmable, and the entire sequence either completes entirely or doesn't happen at all.
Once atomicity made it feasible, flash loans became a standard tool in the on-chain economy for arbitrage, liquidations, collateral swaps, and capital efficiency strategies that aren't possible in traditional payment systems. Of course, any powerful new technology will be abused, which only highlights the novelty of the underlying mechanism.
Flash loans didn't make lending faster or cheaper. They created a way to lend that was structurally impossible before programmable assets and atomic execution. That's what I mean by a "new verb" or a "new action." The system can now do something it couldn't before, not because someone optimized a process, but because the fundamentals changed.
The Limits of Imagination
But I have to be honest about the limits of my own imagination.
I can describe the design space in abstract terms. Public blockchains introduce a set of primitives that didn't exist before: atomic execution, shared global state, programmable custody, deterministic settlement, composability across independent participants, and software assets. We've never had a financial system where settlement, custody, clearing, and execution are all integrated into the same programmable environment. When previously separate layers collapse into one, new things become possible.
But I can't tell you exactly what those things are. And I think that's precisely the point.
Human imagination works backward. We're very good at improving on what already exists, but not very good at conceiving of what was impossible just yesterday. We look at on-chain technology and instinctively ask: What existing products can it make faster and cheaper? The harder, more valuable question is: What can it create that didn't exist before?
I have some hunches. Programmable custody systems that enforce complex agreements without intermediaries. Capital entrusted to software agents operating within bounded constraints. Financial structures that form and dissolve in real-time based on on-chain verified conditions. These directions feel right. But the most important applications might be things I can't describe yet because they're unlike anything I've seen before.
Not being able to list them is perhaps the strongest point of the argument: If I could easily list all the new things, they wouldn't be truly new. The design space is vast, mostly unexplored, and impossible to map by intuition alone. That's the key point.
So, most attempts in this space will fail. A large design space doesn't mean outcomes are easy. But the opportunities embedded in the things that do work are enormous, and we've spent the last thirteen years building pattern recognition to spot them before they're obvious. And that's the opportunity that makes me so excited for the next decade.
Most of the opportunity lies ahead.
If the internet analogy holds, the on-chain equivalents of search, social, cloud, and SaaS haven't been built yet. Email was a trillion-dollar industry; what came after it was orders of magnitude larger.
I think in ten years we'll look back and what will excite us most are things that don't exist today. Things that aren't just more efficient banks, exchanges, or asset managers, but things that are only possible when you have programmable assets in a composable, global, 24/7 environment. Things that seem obvious in hindsight but that we can't see now because there's no precedent for them.
Flash loans give us a glimpse, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The design space is immense, and we've only just begun exploring.
